Getting back to work

Some Definitions

Work: action directed toward a goal.

Temperance: balance made possible by hope and by adherence to ordered priorities.

Diligence: temperate work sustained over time.

Honor: a quantity obtained by achieving goals so long as that achievement is not at the expense of more fundamental goals. (This is not a general definition. Rather it is a concept meant only for this blog.)

As I wrote last week I want to be able to move quickly from ideas to implementation. Ironically that means that I will have to take time to lay some ground work. Let me lay out a road map of this blog:

Big goal: a successful 1 hour per day company built using the principles of work, diligence, and temperance. Can it be done? I can't prove that it can't be done. But I can try and prove by example that it can be done.

Smaller goal: make and sell interactive tools to enhance musical education. This is fun, interesting, and we have worked on it. There is a real market and we think we can make a contribution.

Yet smaller goal: tool up to make simple but effective tools quickly.

Even smaller goal: make very simple, distributable, portable, interactive GUI using Python. Must have 2 modules, a data folder, and use one sound element and one graphical element.

Most of this week will be spent in Lake Powell with Crew 335. The rest will mostly be in Los Alamos. That leaves me a good three hours to work on the "even smaller goal." We'll see what can be done.

Muddling through to direction

I'm going to just type and type, trying to discover whether and how I really want to continue.

So yesterday in church during the sacrament I realized that I did want to go forward. The thought made me happy. But it was a transient thought so I want to process things a little.

One thing that came pretty clearly was the sense that the next 2.5 to three years will pass very quickly. At the end it would be pretty nice to have created something alongside the PhD. Why?

Because it's a challenge.
Because creation of non-evil things is a good in and of itself.
Because I think that if I can do a good job I can see future opportunities open up.
Because there are byproducts like interesting experiences that will be gained and skills that will be developed.

A second thing that I realized is that I am less committed to this exact idea (SongPiper) than I am to the idea of building up a company. We can be flexible if we have to, we just need to do something that works.

One thing that I know is that I can't be happy building my own business if it means that I will be doing a crummy job at work (school). I have to be doing a great job at work (school). And I want to do a great job bringing this thing to life. And it is fully dead right now, good and dead. But it can come to life.

I really believe in the concepts of diligence and temperance. I want to take this as an opportunity to experiment with these concepts and bring them to higher forms and combine them with other principles like patience, hope, and faith.

About patience. I am not intrinsically patient. And I only believe in certain forms of patience: impatience can be a virtue also. Sometimes impatience is linked with the recognition that things are not as they should be. And the action required to change them. That's good impatience. But for me impatience is also linked with a fear that something will never change. For example when I began my graduate program in Baltimore I wanted me PhD to come quickly in part because I doubted whether it would come at all. Patience in working toward your goals is absolutely necessary if you are going to do something large. So what does that patience come from? For me it comes from two different sources. The first source is a combination of hope and vision. It is a belief that the thing you are working for 1) will come to pass if you persevere and 2) will be worth the work, time and effort. I guess the first source is a recognition that the price is worth paying. The second source of patience is akin to reading a good book while standing in line. If I can figure out how to live a good life while working toward the good thing then waiting isn't so bad. The second source of patience, then, just comes from lowering the price you are paying. Anyway, if patience means that you learn to live with being dirty so you stop being excited to shower--it could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the situation.

That's what you get when you just start typing: tangents. My biggest fear with moving forward is that I need to be focusing on something more important. So here is the deal: I think the time is here to focus on building something. And hopefully that something can be flexible enough to begin to fill real needs. Or maybe this something is just a toy something. And if so perhaps I can learn lessons that will be valuable as things progress. Here we go.

How about this: the most intelligent, living approach is not an a priori approach but rather an iterative feedback approach. If that is the case then I don't need to know everything from the beginning. In fact it would be a mistake to decide everything at the beginning. So perhaps it is more important to move forward and develop some skills and start listening to feedback than it is to worry about whether I am doing the very most important things right now.

Alright, enough. Let us begin. SongPiper is a learning and a doing company. We emphasize quick implementation of fun ideas and simplicity rather than elaboration. If a project isn't fun we don't do it. Or at least we step back and figure out how to do it right. Or we find something that is fun. Because we learn through feedback and iteration we try to make the creation-feedback loop as fast as possible.

Teec Nos Pos

We got stuck there. Altell didn't cut it. We hiked over barb wire fence for a phone but that failed. The hogon had no phone. But we got the car going and made it back down to Teec Nos Pos from which we called a tow truck to get the van and some friends to get us.


Allen and Camille were the friends. They drove a good hour to an hour and a half to get to us and took us into their home. My parents lent us their van and Gina's brother Ben drove it down and we all drove up to Gina's home.

It's given me the opportunity to think a little about security and about self-reliance. We accepted a lot of help when the van let us down. I was grateful for it. I am grateful for it. And I can't help but think how valuable it was to have friends and family who we know and trust and who were willing to go out of their way to help us when the chips were down.

Self-reliance is a fiction. An important fiction, but a fiction. We weren't born self-reliant and we won't die self-reliant and in between there is never a time when we are self-reliant.

But we try. We think we might have to stop taking Sarah, our 230000 mile 93 Ford Aerostar, on long trips. Perhaps by changing vehicles we can at least lower the chance of something like that happening again. Anyway, given that real self reliance is a fiction, what should we try to achieve?

I don't know. But I have two partial answers. One, try to give more than you take. Two, try not to put yourself in helpless positions. Rather try to put yourself in helpful positions.


Report: this week I learned a bit about Pygames.

Alignment and caring

Tkinter is nice. I wrote my first simple, toy GUIs.

But for the most part I've been absorbed in modeling modeling phase interactions between two lasers in an EIT medium. The whole concept of seeing a photon without absorbing it is super exciting. And it may help me finish up this PhD.

I've also been busy getting ready for 2 weeks out of town. First is a week in Utah seeing first Gina's family then the Bradshaw family then the Tate family. Then comes a half week in southern New Mexico. It's an academic research retreat involving a BEC experimental group, a BEC theoretical group and a quantum feedback and control group. Finally we have a half week in Lake Powell with the venture scouts. Nothing to complain about. But a lot to get ready for.

The bottom line is that there is a lot that can easily squeeze this whole venture right out of my life. I have to decide if it is worth it to keep it going or if it would be better to just streamline things a bit.

A tree will grow large and strong over time. It doesn't take much time in any given week. But if you want to guarentee its growth you will have to dedicate some time. Actually, time isn't the right word. Perhaps the right word is care. I like that better because it implies attention so that you can see what the tree needs and then action to fulfill those needs. Perhaps the limiting resource in my life isn't time or money but the ability to care.

Perhaps you can love an infinite number of people in an abstract sense. But how many people can you care for in an active, nurturing sense? One? Ten? One hundred? Your time and personal attention have to stretch thin at some point. And how many goals can you dedicate your life too? Probably only one. (Tangent: Of course most goals don't need you to dedicate your life. They just need a little slice of it. And different goals need different slices. A tree or any other organic thing needs regular attention more than lots of attention all at once. Certain types of problems really need a lot of attention all at once and are more difficult to solve in little slices.) All the rest of your goals in that case are subgoals. Means to ends. That means that they have to be evaluated within the framework of larger goals. If they are not aligned with the larger goals and with each other you are likely to find yourself wandering around frustrated. But how many subgoals can you care about simultaneously? For me it is hard to care about many more than one at a time. When I focus on one the others seem like distractions. But no matter what's easy and what's difficult life requires the juggling. (And juggling is a great metaphore. You only interact with one or two objects at a time while the rest are in the air.) So I juggle.

This whole discussion is a rational description of an intuitive decision making process. The model is not complete. And it's pretty abstract. But the question that I want to think about right now is this: do I care enough about SongPiper to make it happen? Should I care enough about it to make it happen? If not then either it isn't aligned with my larger goals or I don't see how it is aligned. If not then another direction is in order.

Our most important set of choices may be those that determine what we care about.

More like a journal entry . . .

This was the first week wherein I was able to spend more than a single day up at Los Alamos. It was a treat. I feel like I got some great things done, modeling the two-photon absorption and cross Kerr nonlinearity of a four-level atomic system and looking at squeezed states.

For a long time I've been searching for the perfect medium in which to do analytical mathematics. There may not be one. But after avoiding Mathematica for years because of one silly thing (I hated it that you had to push shift-enter rather than just enter to compute the value of an expression) I'm falling in love with Mathematica. I think I like the whole functional programming concept in general. But Mathematica is more than just functional programming (as far as my needs go, anyway). It's functional programming with a huge set of venerable and powerful mathematical, analytical, and numerical tools already present. I haven't found a good module to do linear operator algebra in there though so I might have to write one of my own. But there must be something out there.

Anyway, that took up most of my mind-share this week. But I did email Ryan the first version of SongPiper where the user can customize their own levels.

And I half decided that that will be where it stops. I read a nice article on short-term decision making in startups and realized that I have been guilty of it. I've been patching up a rough draft in a language that I think I want to abandon instead of having the courage to switch tracks before I invest too much more. I want to move things over to Python. But I don't know Python yet so that will take a bit of time to do.

So I have no idea how long all this should take because I haven't developed in Python much before and because this will be a busy couple of weeks.

Let me finish with a quick argument for doing what you like doing: If you do what you don't like to do you might possibly get good at it. Then everybody will want you to keep on doing it. But if you do what you do like to do you probably will get good at it. Then everybody will want you to keep on doing it. And you'll agree with them.


Have a great week.

Love
Doug

Sales

Haven't sold the copy. I did get the program to be able to read files. I didn't use that ability to renovate the levels yet.

Sales goals. I need to think a bit about sales goals. In a way, you might say that a company is sales. If there aren't sales there isn't a company. If you have a product that everybody and their brother buys and if there is a margin there then you have a company. You might say that a key requirement for the success of any company is sales.

But at least this week, a sales goal didn't sit well. It didn't sit well on a couple of counts. First of all, sales seemed like a distraction at this time when development seemed key. But secondly and more importantly, it was a goal for other people rather than for myself. That fact can easily lead to problems. It can lead to manipulation, to dishonesty. Perhaps less obviously, it can lead you to forget the best interests of the perpective buyer and focus instead on a sale. There seems to be something about a goal that involves changing the behavior of other people that is incompatible with the ideals of a company built to do good.


So there is a tricky thing to think about: you want people to buy your product. But if you make selling it your primary focus you can shoot yourself in the foot morally and probably strategically as well. The best solution that I have for the moment is that sales should be a goal, but only as a byproduct of excellence in other areas. There are really only two other areas: product development and communication. You make something that people will value and then you find ways to let them know about it.

So I think it is OK to have sales aspirations. There is no company without sales. But as far as reaching those aspirations with short term goals, I don't want to do it using sales goals. Rather, I want to focus on product development and communication. I guess the aspirations are goals. But by focusing on your own actions and not on the actions of others you can avoid a lot of the morally grey spots that come from a more direct focus on sales.

So that's what I intend to start doing.

Doug